Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies

TAMPA (The Borowitz Report)—Infused with a sense of urgency as Election Day nears, the Trump campaign has enlisted President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, to appear with the Republican nominee in a dizzying array of swing-state rallies over the weekend.

Putin will be the most visible Trump surrogate in the final weekend of the campaign, as he tries to fire up voters in Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada.

The Russian President seemed to relish the warm response he got at his first Trump rally, in Tampa, where he led the crowd in a raucous chant of “Lock her up.”

Trump praised Putin’s talent for politics by noting that he had won the Russian election in 2012 by a landslide. “He got sixty-four per cent of the vote, and no one else even came close,” Trump said. “He’s terrific.”

Putin, whose English is rudimentary at best, kept his remarks brief at the Tampa rally, but echoed Melania Trump’s recent call for an end to bullying.

A Republican strategist, Harland Dorrinson, called the Trump campaign’s use of Putin in crucial battleground states “very, very smart.”

“At this point, you really couldn’t ask for a more effective surrogate,” he said. “You’d much rather see Trump up there with Putin than with, say, Chris Christie.”

While some in the media criticized the Trump campaign for allowing Putin to influence the outcome of a U.S. election, the Republican nominee’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, pushed back in an appearance on CNN.

“This is just another case of media bias against Donald Trump,” she said. “Jay Z and Beyoncé, who have no experience in government at all, are allowed to campaign for Hillary Clinton, but Vladimir Putin, who actually runs an entire country, can’t appear with Donald Trump? Come on.”

Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com.